A Hero Android Developer Leaves His Job At Samsung And Criticizes The Galaxy S4

He was a well-regarded
Android
developer who worked on the CyanogenMod project, which lets
users add a greater level of customization to their phones, so it
was natural for Samsung to poach him away.

A year and a half later, Kondik
has left his job at Samsung, but not before sharing some thoughts
on the Galaxy S4 on
his Google+ page.

Overall, Kondik says the Galaxy S4 is a good phone, but he
criticizes Samsung's "TouchWiz" interface that modifies Google's
basic Android layout.

Here's what Kondik wrote:

TouchWiz has become a bit more consistent with the latest
upgrade. There are no more jarring mismatches in different parts
of the OS, and it's been lightened up a bit and has a clean
"flat" feel. Unfortunately, it feels like it has been sent a few
years back in time to the Froyo days.
Say goodbye to all of the nice touch-friendly ViewPagers and say
hello again to a fully tabbed UI. You'll also enjoy the seemingly
endless onslaught of popup windows and modal "Loading..."
dialogs. UI performance is average. It's better and worse at the
same time, depending on your viewpoint I suppose.

He went on to criticize some other features on the Galaxy
S4, including the eye-tracking scrolling technology:

Some of the new features are very useful like the "hover"
preview where you can just point at an email message without
touching the screen and it shows a preview of the message. The
multi-window feature is present here, and is nice to have around
when you need it. The camera app has seen some significant
upgrades too, with live previews of the postprocessing effects
and a new UI. My least favorite new feature is "Smart Scroll"
which is supposed to scroll based on face detection + tilt, but
it mostly serves to anger me into disabling it.

Kondik does say you should buy the Galaxy S4 if you want to
upgrade from the Galaxy S
II, but says it's "less urgent" to upgrade if you have
the Galaxy S
III.